New Etsy Shop

I've opened a new Etsy shop to try and help those people who know me better when I'm wearing my animator's hat.

I've had contact from people who couldn't find me on Etsy because they'd been searching for my name.

My new Etsy shop address is http://markmason.etsy.com/

CuriouslyDrawn will remain open for the time being to help redirect visitors to the new shop.

The Art of Japan Exhibition

We seem to be doing very well for exhibitions of woodblock prints in the North West of England this year. If you hurry, you can catch the last few days of "The Art of Japan" an exhibition of woodblock prints and paintings at the Peter Scott Gallery at Lancaster University.

The exhibition is made up of prints on loan from the Blackburn Art Gallery collection and the University's own collection and include original works by Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, Eisen, Koson and many others. There are examples of Ukiyo-e prints, including Hokusai's "Great Wave", "Red Fuji" and "Fuji with Lightning" and also some beautiful surimono (Monkey & Turtle), Sumo prints, silk painting and some lovely examples of prints from the Shin Hanga movement.

Monkey and Turtle Surimono

The real highlight for me though were 3 woodblocks in a glass cabinet, and one in particular. It was an original block of a page from one of Kitao Masayoshi's abbreviated drawing books! I never thought I'd ever see one of those. I would never have imagined that any would have even survived over the years, but there it was. It had obviously been cut in half, as a block for a book would have 2 pages on it, and it had also been painted white with the relief lines painted black at some time in it's history.

The exhibition runs until May 30th, late night Thursday until 9.00pm.

Tests for new print set

My studio table today.

I've not posted for a few weeks because things are a little busy at the moment,

but at last I'm able to show you the first test prints of a new woodblock project I've started on.

I've given myself the task to produce 3 animal and 2 haiku calligraphy prints per season.

These are my "Spring" animal prints.

The baby rabbit and robin picture is called "Sakura" (Cherry Blossom), the Japanese characters for cherry blossom are hidden in the branches of the tree. The grey rabbit and blue tits print is entitled "Rabbit Calligraphy" (Although I've hopefully got the Japanese characters for rabbit and calligraphy right, I don't know how to say it!). The rabbit has written the word "spring" using his brush and ink. The final image of the kimono clad dancing mouse is called "Harukaze" (Spring Breeze).

I've searched for Japanese script haiku that reflect the seasons and also include a reference to animals and I've carved 2 of these. The Spring haiku I've chosen are:

New Year's Day: the clouds are gone and sparrows are telling each other tales.

(Ransetu)

Serenely gazing up at the mountain - a toad.

(Issa)

I'm keeping the designs quite simple, and, at most, only using 5 blocks, although a block could contain more than one colour. The original drawings were pretty loose and sketchy and so I'm trying to keep the prints that way too.

I'm using Shina ply and each image is about 5x7".

The aim is to do a print run of 30 to 40 of each image, of which 20 will be set aside for the final stage of my project. The remaining prints which are good enough will be sold individually (I estimate around 5-10) as a very limited edition.

So, the final stage...

You may have noticed that 2 of the test prints are on the same piece of paper. This is because the paper is going to be folded down the middle (with the reverse side of the images facing each other) to form the 2 sides of a book page.

When I've produced a set of 3 Spring, 3 Summer, 3 Autumn and 3 Winter animal prints with 2 seasonal Haiku for each (a carved block of Japanese characters), a "chapter" title for each season and a couple of information pages, I'll bind them together using Japanese papers and bookbinding methods to create 20 5x7" original print books for sale through Etsy.

So don't be expecting the books any day soon. It will probably be around this time next year (at the earliest) as I've got to fit in the small task of earning a living doing the day job. The "extra" prints will be available throughout the year, as I complete them.

I realise the economics of this project don't make any kind of business sense; but sometimes the pleasure in just producing something that a few people may really enjoy is reward enough.

I'll be printing these from next week and then I'll have to start thinking about the Summer prints.

Hiroshige in the Pleasure Capital...of Blackpool

In January I posted information about the exhibition of original Hiroshige prints "The Moon Reflected" and it's arrival in Blackpool at the Grundy Art Gallery.

We went to see it over the weekend, and I'll be going back again before it closes on April 26th.

It was fantastic, and I urge everyone not to miss this great opportunity to view, close up, these woodblock prints, produced in Hiroshige's lifetime.

We've all seen these images in books and reproduced as posters; some of us may also be lucky enough to own a modern woodblock reproduction from The Adachi Studio, but it's not every day that you get the chance to see original period prints. These are what the prints Van Gogh and his friends saw looked like. This is what fired the Impressionists; and it will inspire you.

If you're an illustrator, artist, printmaker, graphic designer, animator or web designer and you haven't been to this exhibition yet, then hang your head in shame. It's so rare for prints of this age and quality to make it out of the British Museum's collection and travel to a small gallery in the North of England, and on our visit (on a very wet Saturday afternoon) there were only 3 other people there!

Thank you British Museum and Ikon Gallery. We all can't just pop down to London to see these prints, and I for one will never forget the experience of viewing this art.

The arrival of these prints in Europe over 150 years ago revolutionised art and design. It created a seismic shift so large that it's difficult to imagine what route European art, design and photography would have taken without them. I'm not overstating this, but we are now so used to seeing the influences of these prints that they're virtually invisible to us. Start to really observe, rather than just looking and be astonished. Even artists and designers who've never heard of Hiroshige are influenced by him through a kind of visual osmosis.

The exhibition runs until April 26th. You still have time to get there.

A Blast from the Stone Age Past.

As a result of some online conversations about new developments in traditional 2D paperless animation and some of the very early pieces of animation software (Hands up; who had an Amiga computer and ran DeluxePaint and Take2 on it?) I received an email from Jerome Lorin who kindly included a link to a piece of animation I worked on with Billy Allison from Core Design in 1994.

Have a peep HERE.

It was a title sequence for the Sega computer game "Chuck Rock II". We had to work within the huge constraints of computer game memory at the time, and so the animation is rather limited in places. I thought I'd add it to the Blog purely for it's nostalgia value. At the time though, the title sequence received a host of 5 star ratings in computer magazines.

The "inking" and colour work was produced in DeluxePaint, on good old Amiga computers.

I continued to use an Amiga for animation pencil tests (Using the excellent Take2 program) up until the end of "Second Star to the Left" in around 2002. Amigas were great little computers with excellent graphics capabilities (2D and 3D) far in excess of PCs at the time. It's a shame they got left behind in the blitz of hype and publicity that surrounded the dull old PC that most of us use today. Amigas were happy computers.

Hydrus Watercolour tests. The results are in...

The completed test image.

6 months ago I started a test to check the lightfastness of Hydrus Fine Art Watercolour by Dr. Ph. Martin's as compared with Winsor and Newton Artist's Watercolour which has a measured lightfastness rating. Previous posts on how, and why I decided to run this test are HERE.

As you can see from the above image, and compare it with the image from the start of the test, there is no fading. The slightly lighter appearance of the red at the top righthand side is due to my application of the watercolour and can be seen in the original image too.

The Hydrus colours are the top 3, the Winsor and Newton are the 3 at the bottom.

I was expecting to see some evidence of a faded edge line where I'd placed thick card to create the unexposed areas, but there is none.

This test sheet has been sat in a south facing (ie: direct sunlight) for 6 months. The area on the far left has been unexposed, the next section exposed for 2 months, the next for 4 and the far righthand side has been exposed for the full 6 months.

The weather has been bright and sunny on the whole. You would never put a watercolour painting in direct sunlight, so this has been a tough test for the pigments. The Hydrus colours have stood up to the task brilliantly, and I'm now confident that I can produce water based woodblock prints with either the Hydrus colours or the Winsor and Newton watercolours without any fear of fading.

The good thing about the Hydrus colours is that they're so quick to use straight from the bottle and diluted with water. One drop of colour goes such a long way, and by using the pipette each bottle contains, it's easy to keep a record of mixing and diluting measurements just in case you need to remix another amount. I just wish they were more readily available in the UK. I had to order mine via mail order in the US.

I hope others will find this test useful when deciding which materials to use for their art projects.

A Kind Mention...

I received a very nice mention on Tatsuko's Blog recently. She'd had a hunt around Etsy to find the nicest ratty items for Chinese New Year and decided to include my Year of the Rat postcard. Have a peep at her blog, she makes some really charming items.